


The Hunter and the Sea-King's Daugher

by downbythebay



Category: Pacific Rim (2013)
Genre: Adult Content, Alternate Universe - Fantasy, Canonical Character Death, Child Abuse, Depression, F/M, Sexual Content
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-02-21
Updated: 2014-02-21
Packaged: 2018-01-13 07:22:29
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,391
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1217503
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/downbythebay/pseuds/downbythebay
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Chuck's mother was a mermaid; a story mostly about Herc, but also Chuck, and what it means to be in-between.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Hunter and the Sea-King's Daugher

**Author's Note:**

> For the Pacific Rim Mini-Bang at http://pr-minibang.tumblr.com. With art by cathydraws http://cathybytes.tumblr.com.

They say in the drift there is truth; that between two souls laid bare there can be no illusions, no masks of social graces. If only the drift were comprised of something so simple as falsehood, something logical and straight-forward.

Memory is imperfect, corrupted by time and colored by the filter of its host-mind. The truth is we lie to ourselves as well as, sometimes even better than we lie to the rest of the world. And co-pilots are hardly objective, passive witnesses to one another’s thoughts and imaginings.

Herc doesn’t even try to prepare Chuck for what he might see in the drift. He doesn’t think Chuck would believe him anyway; he’s not sure he believes it himself. 

 

_I. A bird may love a fish…_

 

**2008**

Chuck is five years old; they still call him Charlie. When Herc arrives home from the base Angela is seated in the kitchen. There is a glass of water on the table, pricked with beads of sweat, leaving a ring of condensation on the table. Herc is bone tired and he knows, instinctively, that something is wrong. 

He cannot shake the sinking feeling in his belly. Later, in his memory, Angela seems paler than usual. He thinks it is just a product of his imagining, filling in the symptoms to make sense of the leaps his mind always made with Angela. 

“Where’s Charlie?” 

Angela looks up from the table. Her lips part; the sigh that escapes them sounds like music, relief. He realizes that her clothes are wet. 

Herc takes the stairs two at a time. The bathroom door at the top of the steps has swelled in its frame with the humidity; he nearly puts his body through it before it opens. 

He doesn’t remember pulling Chuck out of the water, pressing his ear to Chuck’s mouth, starting CPR. He knows these things must have happened, and so his mind fills in the gaps. He remembers thinking, “Not this. Anything else. Not my son.” 

Herc is vaguely aware of Angela, lingering in the doorway, leaving a puddle in the carpet and her fingers pressed to her lips in distress.

“He doesn’t belong,” she says. “He doesn’t belong here.”

Herc tells her to shut the fuck up and counts: one, two, three, four…

When Chuck finally sputters and takes a gasping breath, Herc feels as though he’s come up for air for the first time in years. And he wraps his son in a fluffy towel and holds him against his chest until he’s absolutely certain that both their hearts are beating.

Chuck sleeps through the night; no bad dreams. The next morning doesn’t remember any of it, for which Herc is grateful, right up until they enter the Drift together.

 

The memory surfaces in the middle of their fight against Ceramander off the coast of Kailua Kona. The overabundance of terror and anger and confusion and doubt Herc had felt in those few moments washes over them all at once like a tidal wave. Chuck balks.

_—That didn’t happen_

_—It did_

_—She loved me_

“Whoa, Striker Eureka, you’re flying way out of alignment.” 

The voice of Tendo Choi comes over the intercom from LOCCENT. They manage to keep their Jaeger under control, just barely. If not for Coyote Tango, the Big Island would be nothing but a waste of volcanic ash.

_—She was just different_

_—What does that make me_

_—My son_

_—That is not enough_

Herc cannot tell whether the hurt and shame and rage that hangs between them has come from himself or from Chuck. He can feel the Jaeger shuddering, like the creaking of old joints, pins and needles pricking at his hands and feet. 

 

Chuck is 16 when he first sets foot in a Jaeger, and his father’s memories give credence to a fear he has carried with him all his life. That he does not belong.

 

**2002**

One summer Herc and Scott charter a boat, just to get out of the fucking city, maybe fish a little, and explore some of the reefs of Port Phillips Bay. They pack a cooler full of beer and a loaf of bread and not much else in preparation for spending a few days on the water. 

“Something big on the sounder,” Scott calls, looking over the SONAR display in the cabin. “Pretty close to the surface, too.”

“Maybe a dolphin?” Herc suggests, peering over the railing into the dark water, lapping against the side of the boat.

“No way,” Scott shakes his head doubtfully. “I think there are a couple nets below deck, maybe we should try to get a closer look?”

“Just leave it.” 

Herc replaces his sunglasses and takes up his perch at the nose of the boat, reclining in in the sun. As the boat rocks in the surf and the calls of gulls float on the salt air he drifts in and out of awareness. 

He’s jarred from his reverie by the sound of screaming, like a wounded animal. He covers his ears, but it doesn’t even begin to muffle the sound. 

From the pilot house Scott laughs and revs the engine. The boat lurches forward, nets and tackle trailing behind, dragging some poor ensnared creature behind as it thrashed and made an inhuman racket.

Herc grabs the knife from the tackle box and sawed at the rope until the net came loose, and the animal spilled free with a flash of dark scales. Scott guffaws, looking back.

“Jesus Christ, what the hell was that?”

Herc rolls his eyes. “Jackass.” 

 

**2003**

The day after Herc and Angela return from their honeymoon, his mother arrives on their doorstep. He hasn’t seen her in close to five years, and she looks the same, if perhaps a bit older and sadder. He remembers the sick feeling he used to get in his stomach when he saw her. He’s a little surprised to find that all he feels is tired and annoyed. 

“You didn’t invite me to your wedding?” 

Herc doesn’t even know how she found out he had gotten married. He thinks perhaps Scott told her out of spite. Herc had severed ties with the woman back when their father died, but Scott liked to indulge in the old family drama. 

“You weren’t welcome.”

“Can I come in?”

Angela is pregnant. She hasn’t said anything yet, but he knows her body better than he knows himself, like he knows his Hornet. The way it rolls and pitches and yaws in the open air and maneuvers in combat, in tight corners, under stress. 

Scott had run away from home at sixteen; Herc had enlisted when he turned eighteen because he couldn’t stand to spend another minute in that house and he does not want to subject Angela to that kind of pressure-cooker. 

“It’s not a good time,” he says, but his mother pushes past him anyway. 

The house is still full of presents and boxes, and wrapping paper and dirty laundry in piles in the hall and dirty dishes in the sink. Angela is not great with chores. Instead she occupies herself, going through their wedding gifts once more, polishing the new silverware, folding and refolding the linens. 

Angela is arranging their new china in the glass case in the front hall. Herc wouldn’t call it “fine,” but the plates all have a shining gold band around the edge that’ll probably scrub off the first time they’re washed and Angela loves them. 

Angela is wearing cutoff shorts and a Springsteen concert tee-shirt and when she turns around to greet them his mother begins to cry. Herc has to grit his teeth to keep from snapping.

“May I help you?” Angela asks.

“This is my wife,” Herc says. “Angela, this is Tess, my mother.”

There is no explanation as to how Angela knows; he’s never opened his mouth about what would happen when his father was away, not to anyone. Most of the time, he himself remembers it like it was just a bad dream. But with a glint of Angela’s eye, Herc is certain she understands. Like she can read it on his body and in the way he moves, as if their souls were entwined, if there was indeed a soul to share between them.

Angela stands up straight, her shoulders square; every trace of the dizzying amusement she takes in pretty things vanishes as she looks his mother in the face and articulates very carefully.

“Get out of my house.”

“Excuse me?” Tess says.

“Get out!”

It comes as a shriek this time, as Angela snatches and unfortunate piece of crockery from the dining set and hurls it across the room.

“Out!”

Herc thinks he should try to calm her. On one hand Angela’s rage frightens him and on the other he finds there is something wonderfully righteous in it.

 

**2002**

Scott elects to sleep below deck on the little fishing boat, but Herc is far too claustrophobic for that. Instead he lies out on the stern of the boat in the light of the moon. 

He’s in the comfortable place between sleeping and awake when he notices the pale form moving through the water. He watches it turn circles with detached interest until a thump against the side of the boat jars him out of his imagination. 

The little fishing vessel is not precisely a dingy, but Herc still isn’t one hundred-percent convinced of its seaworthiness. The jolt would have been strong enough to rouse Scott, if he hadn’t drunk enough to anesthetize a mid-sized marsupial before falling asleep, and Herc is on his feet in an instant. He looks over the water in time to see what he thinks is a head, just above the surface, hair fanning around it like seaweed. He stares until it bobs under the water, leaving ripples in its wake.

A few yards away there’s a splash, and Herc catches a glimpse of something in the water, like moonlight on scales. He walks the port side of the boat, looking over the edge of the railing, waiting for another impact. He reaches the far end of the boat and looks back and notices a figure perched on the back end of the boat.

“Jesus Christ.” 

He blinks a few times to try to clear his vision, but she remains a young woman her arms folded on the gunwale and her chin resting on her arms as she stares back at him. He thinks about calling for Scott, but in the all-too-likely event that he has finally lost his mind, he’d rather Scott not be a witness to it. 

He approaches slowly, scanning the boat for anything that could potentially be used as a weapon. There’s a dull fishing knife in the open tackle box on deck and he picks it up as he moves closer. 

They’re far enough south that it never gets truly pitch-dark, even in the middle of the night and as he peers over the edge of the boat, he’s able to follow the line of her back to her waist where bare flesh meets with dark scales which dip below the water and re-emerges in a wide fluke that flaps against the surface of the water.

“You’ve got to be fucking—”

He wipes his hand across his mouth uneasily. He thinks he might be sick.

“You speak English?” 

He hopes she understands. He hasn’t got the head for languages, and he doubts the three words he knows of Arabic and a year of high school Latin will be of much use in deciphering fish-language.

Her hair was tangled with seaweed and bits of shell and bone; some of them were as small as fish bones, but he’s almost certain some of them are human.

She looks to the knife in his hand with interest.

“Are you the sailor who cut me loose?”

She’s quite articulate, to Herc’s surprise. He imagines conversing with another species must be much more common for her than it is for him. 

“I’m a pilot.” 

After spending some time in naval aviation, he’s accustomed to making the distinction. In anticipation of cool nights, he brought the jacket he usually wore over his flight suit. There’s an RAAF lapel pin on the breast. He sets the knife down and unpins the pair of wings and holds them out to her.

“Of a ship?”

She reaches out to take the pin and he snatches his hand away. She turns the insignia over in her hands, examining the edges of the wings and crown with long, slender fingers. 

“A plane,” he points upward. “With wings.”

She turns her head upward. Overhead, there’s a bright light moving across the sky, to quickly to be a planet; he thinks it must be a satellite. She watches it with a look of wonder on her face, as though she’s imagining him sailing among stars. 

“You must be extraordinary,” she says and Herc can’t help but notice how unspeakably beautiful she is. 

“I’m just a bloke,” he says. He thinks he might be one who’s gone insane, or perhaps is suffering from heatstroke. 

She looks to him quite sternly. He can hear the flapping of her tail on the water, and there’s something soothing about it, despite the strangeness. 

“A lesser man would have thrown himself to his death by now.” The look on her face is something like sadness, or regret. “They say when men die at sea, they return as gulls.”

Herc doesn’t believe in the afterlife; not out of cynicism, but because in comparison to a place where sins were punished and you were reunited with the dead, the idea of oblivion was more comforting. He doesn’t think he’d mind coming back as a bird, though.

“And what happens to you when you die?”

“I don’t die,” she says. “Never.”

“What do you want?” he asks, letting himself move closer in spite of his better judgment.

“I owe you a debt,” she says. “My father is a king and I won’t be in your thrall. We have treasure, knowledge, power: name your ransom.”

She holds her head up very high and the crest of her bare shoulders rises over the edge of the railing and he thinks again of how lovely she is.

“Can I kiss you?”

“That’s a dangerous thing to ask,” she looks startled.

“For a kiss?”

“A promise,” she says. “Of loyalty, yours and mine.”

“I didn’t mean to suggest—It’s alright, then. You should go.” He tries to wave her away, but instead she pulls herself up on the gunwale.

It becomes extraordinarily apparent, how naked she is. He’s thankful he has the presence of mind to avert his eyes before he becomes too engrossed in her unique anatomy. 

“I’ve never been on dry land. Though it’s not unheard of,” the words seem to bubble out of her as what he took for reluctance turns to excitement. “My father would try to punish you.”

“I’m not a sailor,” he says. 

She catches him by the front of his shirt and pulls him in with surprising strength and seals her lips over his. 

 

_II. “I should have been a pair of ragged claws, scuttling across the floors of silent seas.”_

 

**2008**

Herc takes a pillow and a blanket to sit outside Chuck’s door, though he has no hope of sleeping. He’s afraid he became his father, after all, that he married a woman like his mother. He’s too afraid of what will happen if he kicks Angela out of the house.

“Herc, please come to bed,” Angela slips through the door at the other end of the hall.

“Angela, just go back to bed,” he says as calmly as he can manage. 

He’s afraid of what will happen on his next tour if he leaves her alone with their son. He’s afraid of what happens to kids when those who are responsible for them don’t love them like they should.

“Don’t be mad at me anymore,” she says. 

Herc’s afraid that his son will end up like him, or Scott, or Angela.

“Christ, Ange, I can’t even look at your right now,” he rises to his feet. “Will you just go the fuck back in the bedroom.” 

He uses just the smallest portion of the venom he knows he has in him; he’s afraid of that, too.

“Why? Why?” she wails and he shushes her harshly and grabs her under the arm to pull her away from the nursery.

“You could have killed him. You almost did; if I had got home a minute later—” His vision blurs. The migraine that has been lingering behind his eyes all evening begins to throb in full-force. He thinks he might vomit.

“I wouldn’t let that happen,” Angela says. “He’s like me. He certainly can’t drown.”

“Jesus Christ, do you even hear yourself?” He rubs his temples. “Do you know how crazy you sound?”

He doesn’t think Angela would have looked more shocked if he had struck her.

“Crazy?” she says. “I’m crazy?”

The resentment in her voice makes him regret his words. She throws her hands out in frustration.

“Or have you actually managed to delude yourself into thinking we’re perfectly normal?” 

The churning in his stomach and the pounding in his head nearly blinds him. 

“We are normal.”

“We are not normal, Hercules.” She catches his face between her hands and pulls his head down to meet hers. “Normal people don’t have a song in their head that charms fish out of the sea.”

He can feel her breath against his mouth and she moves her cool hands down to the back of his neck. His headache begins to dissipate. 

“I don’t belong here,” she says. “I chose to stay, in spite of everything, I still choose to stay. You asked me, but it was my choice. My son didn’t make that promise.”

“He’s my son, too, Angela,” he says sternly.

Her hands fall away from him. 

“He would be happier in my father’s house.”

Herc shakes his head. “I don’t believe that.”

 

*

 

They say Striker Eureka is the best there is. They say this because $100 billion of government money went into building her. In time, what Herc comes to realize is that Striker Eureka is the best Jaeger there is because Chuck is the best pilot they have. He knows this objectively, without any sense of fatherly obligation or pride. Herc has been with the program since nearly the beginning and Chuck takes to piloting like nothing he’s ever seen. 

If Striker is the most deadly weapon they have on the side of humanity, it is because Chuck has inherited his mother’s fierceness. If she is the fastest and most agile, it is because Chuck has in his bones the instincts of a sea-born creature as an inheritance. Lucky Seven never moved the way Herc has felt Striker Eureka coursing through his veins. For all of Chuck’s cocksurety, when Striker Eureka drops, the ocean gives way for the son of the sea-king’s daughter. 

 

**2015**

The night of the Pan Pacific Defense Corps Ball, a public relations stunt to christen the new Sydney facility and legitimize billions of government spending, it takes Angela almost fifteen minutes to disentangle Chuck from the tail of her dress. He leaves a trail of snot and tears on the chiffon fabric. It’s the same dress she wore last year with the pearls he gave her on their wedding day, but it’s the best dress she’s got, and she gathers it up carefully as she climbs into his truck. 

He doesn’t dare mention that it’s not normal behavior for Chuck to be so attached to her; he doesn’t want to get into another row before meeting with his colleagues. It seems so strange that they’ve aligned against him, like Angela can’t even remember what she did. He thinks it’s for the best; he’s hardly ever home now that he’s on loan to the new program.

Angela didn’t want him to take the new job. She said things were better since she got the job at the shop. She’s a very good salesperson—frighteningly good—she has a genuine love of beautiful things and an inexplicable talent for getting people to do what she wants in spite of her idiosyncrasies. 

But he didn’t take the job for the money or the so-called promotion. In the end, Herc was his father’s son; he was a soldier. The first time he held his son, fresh off the plane from Iraq, Chuck was already three weeks old. And he took the job with the Pan Pacific Defense Corps because the monsters kept coming, and if he fit their profile, if he was of value, that seemed the best way to keep his family safe.

Angela dabs her eyes and brushes on an extra coat of rouge before she gets out of the car. 

The hall is more crowded than formal events of past years, with staff from different branches all over the globe coming to get the new facility up and running. Herc finds himself in the unusual position of playing go-between for his squadron and the visiting PPDC personnel at the long table at the center of the hall.

There’s a lipstick stain on the rim of Angela’s glass of merlot as they sit and chat with a few members of his squadron.

“Lieutenant Griffin,” he says, as the stoic Stacker Pentecost drew closer to their circle of conversation. “This is Marshall Pentecost, my liaison with the Pan Pacific Defense Corps. He’s going to have me piloting one of these new machines.” 

He doesn’t mention the brain scans and the psychotherapy and all the tests he needs to pass before they’ll clear him for the cockpit. 

“This is your superior officer?” 

Lt. Griffin looks to Marshal Pentecost with his neat mustache and crisp blue suit and bearings which made it abundantly clear he did not suffer fools.

“I bet that really pisses you off.” 

Herc would like to think that there’s a good bit of whiskey in the lieutenant’s words, but Rob Griffin has a long history of unbecoming behavior. And as much Herc tries to smooth things over, Griffin just keeps mouthing off as Pentecost looks on with an unamused half-gaze.

“I can’t stand seeing these guys coming up, green as anything, just so we can have diversity shoved down our throats—”

About that time, Angela very carefully pours her glass of wine down the front of Griffin’s white jacket. Herc thinks he catches the corner of Pentecost’s mustache twitch, just a bit.

“Oh,” she says airily. “You’d better see to that before it stains. Ask for some club soda at the bar; you wouldn’t want to go among civilized people like that.” 

“Marshall,” Herc says, hoping to smooth things over at last. “This is my wife, Angela.”

Pentecost and Angela exchange nods of recognition, which Herc would never have noticed if he hadn’t spent the better part of ten years trying to parse Angela’s secret language of knowing looks and conspiratorial glances.

“I have a son,” Angela says, as if picking up the thread of an unspoken conversation. 

“My apologies. It’s been a long time since I’ve encountered anyone from the old motherland,” Pentecost said. “Mr. Hansen, may I borrow your wife for a moment?”

Herc had long since come to expect strange things to follow his wife wherever she went, and could only agree as the Marshall escorted Angela to the dance floor.

They danced with a sliver of light shining between them, their mouths moving as nimbly and incessantly as their feet as the music played on. 

 

_III. “And certain stars shot madly from their spheres to hear the sea maid’s music.”_

 

The longest conversations they have are in the drift, where thoughts are shared instantaneously. And when Chuck says he wants a life after; Herc knows that is a lie. Neither of them has any intention of surviving this war. The only life he wants is one in which he has a family, in which he had a purpose other than being tempered and forged.

*

It was just past seven o’clock in the morning in Melbourne, a few hours before Trespasser would make landfall in San Francisco. Angela is at the counter, sipping tea and Chuck is in the other room watching cartoons; Herc is on his way out the door.

Angela drops her cup, folding over with a scream of pain.

“Ange.” Herc doubles back. The way she’s contorting, he can’t tell whether the pain is in her stomach or her head as he gets an arm around her waist.

“Can you stand?” he asks.

Angela shakes her head. “Something’s wrong.”

“Mum?” Chuck appears in the doorway, the color drained from his face.

“It’s okay, Charlie; come on,” Herc lifts Angela into his arms. “We’re going to take mum to the doctor.”

In the ten years they’ve been married, Angela has never been sick, never once complained of a sore throat or upset stomach. Not even when she was pregnant. To see her incapacitated by pain sets Herc’s stomach plummeting. Chuck holds Angela’s hand in the car; he says she can squeeze his as hard as she wants. It takes seven minutes for them to reach the base hospital. 

Herc almost misses the first footage coming out of California, because they’re bringing Angela back from an MRI. The drugs they gave her for the pain have left her in a haze, and he’s writing notes on the back of a receipt in his wallet, trying to remember everything the doctors say. He pretends he doesn’t see that Chuck is trying to hide his tears by pulling the collar of his shirt up over his face. 

“I’ll be fine,” Angela says, her eyes heavily lidded.

Herc wants desperately to believe her, but he just can’t shake the feeling of disaster hanging over them. He thinks of Chuck, who is older, at least, than he was when the illusion of safety was ripped from his child-like perception of the world. 

Herc looks to the television in the corner of the room, to the news footage of a giant lizard creature crashing through the Golden Gate Bridge.

“It’s not,” Herc wonders aloud. “Is it?”

Angela shakes her head. 

“Whatever it is,” she says. “It’s not from this world and it wants us gone.”

She reaches out, and the IV machine chirps out a warning. Herc touches her arm and she swats his hands away. 

“I’m almost entirely human,” she says. “And I can still feel it poisoning the water. Everything’s changed.”

Herc can’t tell if it’s the drugs talking, or if he should really be afraid and he shushes her quietly. Chuck dries his eyes furiously and scoots closer to the bed. If Angela were in her right mind, she might tell Herc to give him a hug. 

All of the tests come back inconclusive. Herc tries to imagine a world without Angela and he’s thankful it only takes a few days and some fluids to get her back on her feet. After the events in California, activity on base picks up, keeping him away from home. Chuck clings a little closer his mother. Later Herc wonders if perhaps Chuck had sensed it, somehow, that she was already on borrowed time.

 

_“Just hold on Cherno.”_

_—No one else. No one else dies because we are not enough._

They feel the explosion of Cherno Alpha’s reactor in the water that’s displaced around Striker’s knees. The EMP pulse that fries her circuitry is a cakewalk in comparison to that helplessness. Herc’s instinct is to get out of the harness, to get free, but Striker has one last death rattle left in her that sends him sprawling. He lands on his shoulder, gets in to his old injury—the one he always says is from football and by now that might as well be the truth. 

Climbing out onto the shoulders of Striker Eureka, with one good arm, Herc marvels at how much Chuck reminds him of Angela. Chuck may get his hair and eyes from Herc, but he has his mother’s scream. 

 

**2015**

“I don’t know, man,” Scott says, returning to his seat in the mess. The patch on his vest, a winged number seven, is still brand new and bright white. It’s four days until their first test-drop in the giant metal monster that has been looming over them; it’s been six months since the attack on Sydney which left his son without a mother. 

“Kid’s got salt water in his veins, or something.” Scott returns his attention to his tray of mystery meat and mashed potatoes from a box. 

Scott doesn’t even notice the slip of the tongue, when he meant to say ice water. But what Herc hears, the words that stay with him are salt water.

Because Chuck is seated at the other end of the table and his silence scares Herc more than monsters, and more than the giant cage of pistons and gears that he’s getting ready to climb into. 

Herc slides down the bench to sit across from Chuck. He is trying to be encouraging, but he has never done well emotions. He thinks it must be a product of his upbringing.

“How you holding up, Bud?” 

Chuck looks up, with a look in his eyes that says he is in no mood for niceties. At eleven years old he is old enough to feel the full sting of loss, to carry it with him for the rest of his life, and not old enough to be able to do anything about it. 

“I want to get the thing that got mum.” 

“I know.”

The official word, the story that Pentecost had brought back, was that Angela had been killed during Scissure’s attack. Herc doesn’t believe that. It is more likely she died in the nuclear strikes to the heart of a city of five-million people. But there is a small, small part of him that longs to believe she didn’t die. That maybe, somehow, she finally went home to her father’s house.

He doesn’t dare confide any of this in his son. Herc won’t dare feed him with false hope. And he is afraid of what the truth will do to his son and to the world. Chuck is a hurricane of a temper tantrum waiting to happen, and Chuck is having a hard enough time feeling at home in the world as it is. As his father, Herc thinks it is the least he can do to make sure the storm is pointed in the right direction. 

 

_IV. “The water’s wide, I can’t cross over, and neither I have wings to fly. Give me a boat that can carry two and we’ll sail across, my love and I.”_

 

The last assault to close the breach is a one-way trip. They knew this from the beginning; the only difference now is that Chuck is making the trip alone. But not truly alone. This is not the first time Stacker Pentecost has ridden out to war with dragons and Herc knows the Marshall will see his son home.

“That’s my son you got there. My son.”

The words hang between them in place of everything he wants to say.

 _You are enough. You have always been enough._

“To clear a path. For the lady.”

Herc has never been a praying man, but he closes his eyes and he hopes that wherever Chuck goes, into the void, or maybe somewhere else, that his mother will be there. He remembers seeing them together for the first time, over the computer monitor in Baghdad. From ten thousand kilometers away everything had changed. 

For anything else, the price would have been too great. Their son, born in-between, who would grow up with salt water in his veins and his father’s stubbornness, to save the whole world, everything known and unknown, every human soul and every life in the ocean and earth and sky.

And all at once it’s over, like a spell being broken. 

 

 _V. “And neither the angels in Heaven above / Nor the demons down under the sea / Can ever dissever my soul from the soul / Of the beautiful Annabel Lee.”_

 

The night his son helps to close the breach, Herc dreams of seagulls over an open ocean.

**Author's Note:**

> First off, thank you for tuning in!
> 
> The italicized quotations can be attributed to the following sources, respectively:  
> I. _Fiddler on the Roof;_ a Jewish proverb?  
>  II. “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” by T.S. Eliot  
> III. _A Midsummer Night’s Dream_ by William Shakespeare  
>  IV. “The Water’s Wide” an English folk song  
> V. “Annabel Lee” by Edgar Allan Poe


End file.
